Designing a Series of Emails

When our vice president of global human resources, Tinna Hall, requested a set of email teasers to promote our company-wide employee engagement survey, I had these concerns: how will I carry a consistent theme across all emails? How can I design a flexible format that will effectively communicate the content of each message visually? How do I keep them interesting to our 1,000-plus designers? And lastly, as a member of "branding police" for Affinity Express, how will I accomplish all of this while staying true to our branding?

 Since this was a weekly project that ran for six weeks and all the messages were not provided to me upfront, I just took it one email at a time and tried to design something that would work for both short and long headlines and body copy.

 Here's the design for the first email teaser. I created something simple, clean and colorful, using shapes and colors to symbolize the different opinions and ideas of our people versus a cliché light bulb.

 

I carried the structure of the first design, with the headline, logo, etc., over to the second week email teaser. The wave of colors coming from the head urges employees to voice their thoughts. I didn't go with the overused "man shouting in a megaphone" image.

 

 

For the third week, I transformed our logo into colored puzzle blocks in a playful way and added hand-prints all over to imply that every employee's opinion is different and important.

 

 

Building on the design from the previous email, the focus for the fourth week email was "engagement". I used colorful blocks to emphasize the word and encourage employees to take part in the survey.